GIRL'S DEATH LEAVES ONLY QUESTIONS, GRIEF

Her name was Kathleen. She collected Strawberry Shortcake dolls, rode a lavender bicycle and owned a dog named Lady that waited for her to come home after school. She could be shy in public, chatty at home. Every morning, she melted her father's heart by saying, ``Hello, my daddy.''

She was 11.

Kathleen Marie Flynn was Jim and Esther Flynn's second child and only daughter. She was one of 596 students enrolled at Ponus Ridge Middle School on Sept. 23, 1986, the day she didn't come home.

The school bell rang at 2:40 p.m. Kathleen spent a few minutes organizing the locker she shared with her girlfriend, Lee. Then she disappeared down the paved path she took every day through the woods on her half-mile walk home.

The body was found at 3:30 a.m. in the thick swath of woods between the path and the school athletic fields. The search party included volunteer firefighters who frequented Jim Flynn's fish-and-chips restaurant. He was called to identify the body, accompanied by his priest and a brother-in-law.

His daughter had been raped and strangled.

*

Even today, there is disbelief.

Kathleen was killed a few hundred feet from athletic fields where the soccer and field hockey teams were practicing. The school was in a prosperous neighborhood where the biggest worry had been the boys who sped through the woods on mini-bikes onto busy Hunter's Lane. One ran into a police cruiser.

Hundreds of students, teachers and parents thronged the area in the afternoon. No one saw a thing, at least not anything that led to an arrest.

The Kathleen Flynn homicide investigation is cataloged in thick, white binders at the Norwalk police station. There are 10 volumes.

The names of 100 cops who worked the case to one degree or another are named in the binders. Thirty-two are retired. Two are dead.

Det. Bruce Hume, 43, who was a patrolman in 1986, is the most recent lead investigator. He works the case with his supervisor, Lt. Andrew J. Gale, 41, who had been the primary investigator in the late 1990s.

The binders summarize the crazed weeks and months after the killing, as well as the methodical examination of later leads that took investigators around the country.

Early on, each tidbit reported by the local papers generated waves of phone calls. Police filled out reports on every lead, no matter how insignificant.

Someone reported seeing a man in a Caldor store wearing a wig. They thought the cops should know. Someone else saw a man look at a newspaper with a headline about the killing, then speed off in a car without buying the paper. One citizen who dreamed about the murder called to share it.

Witnesses had seen men in a red sports car and in an old green Chevrolet loitering around the school on the day of the murder. People phoned in 73 tips on red cars and 171 on green cars. One woman from the Bronx drove an old green car to work in Norwalk. Every day for months, someone dutifully reported the car's whereabouts.

The hottest lead came from a student, who told detectives he saw three men confront Kathleen in the woods. He provided a detailed description of two of them. Months later, detectives confronted the boy with their suspicions that the story was made up.

He admitted the lie.

The FBI was called in within days of the killing to compare the crime against a national database of violent crimes. Local detectives tracked down every known sex offender and determined their whereabouts on the afternoon of Sept. 23.

In all, detectives interviewed about 50 men who were suspects, in the loosest sense of the word. Police in nearby Westchester, N.Y., forwarded a thick file on their sex offenders. It included details on men arrested for everything from rape to public urination.

None of it led to an arrest.

The massive file was handed a year ago to Hume, the latest primary investigator. Hume said he always remembers what a Seattle detective told him last fall at seminar on child homicide: ``Chances are the name of the guilty party is already in your case file.''

His file has 1,500 names.

One of them belongs to the investigation's ``primary focus,'' in the words of the city's police chief, Harry Rilling. In a recent interview, Rilling disclosed for the first time that police have a suspect, who is incarcerated for another crime.

Using new technology, they hope to link him through mitochondrial DNA testing of hairs found at the crime scene. Mitochondrial testing, not as exacting as nuclear DNA testing, can link the hairs to an extended family, not an individual.

In coming weeks, investigators will meet with prosecutors and forensic experts to decide if they should go ahead with the mitochondrial test, or wait for better technology. Each test consumes some of the evidence.

``Right now, mitochondrial DNA can tell us certain things,'' Rilling said. ``With other information we have and things that we investigated in the past, it might be enough to get an arrest and a conviction. However, a year from now, two years from now, what might be available to us that might be able to identify a person to the exclusion of everybody else in the entire world?''

It is a gamble.

``We have to roll the dice at some point. That's where we are now,'' Rilling said.

To evaluate the evidence, Rilling invited the assistance of the chief state's attorney's cold case squad, a step local department are sometimes reluctant to take. Rilling said he has no turf concerns.

``One thing is very, very clear. This is not a territorial thing,'' he said. ``The important thing for this case is to get it solved. And I don't care if it's solved by another agency. If they can help us solve this case, that's what's important to me.''

Rilling and his officers will not release any further details about the suspect for fear of tainting a prosecution.

``I fully expect to go to trial at some point,'' Gale said.

It was Gale who reorganized the unwieldy case files three years ago, spending months entering in a computer the names of every person mentioned, a summary of their connection to the case and references to any written statements or reports that name them. Rilling calls Gale extremely thorough.

Gale pursued a long shot after reading about the declassification of satellite surveillance photographs. Could there be a photograph of the crime, taken from space? He supplied the necessary map coordinates, the date and the time. He allowed himself to imagine what a photo might show, perhaps the make and model of every car in the area during the murder? Maybe a license plate?

No such photo existed.

Hume says they are now in a ``holding pattern,'' as they await a decision on the DNA testing. He insists he will remain on an even keel if any forensic testing fails to implicate a suspect.

``There are no lack of leads,'' Hume said.

Gale grew quiet when asked his next step if the investigation's primary suspect is ruled out. He said simply, ``I will be disappointed.''

*

It has been nearly 14 years. Another school year is about to begin. A weeping cherry tree planted in Kathleen's memory on the school grounds has grown from a sapling to a beautiful 18-foot specimen with a sturdy trunk and thick crown of foliage.

Jim and Esther Flynn still live in the house they bought when Kathleen was a toddler.

They know the police have a suspect. They've known for a while. They allow themselves to hope for an arrest.

``I think that would help with a little bit of wondering, the who. The why, I don't think we'll ever know. I don't think we'll ever know the answer to why did this happen,'' Esther Flynn said. ``I think it would nice to find out who, and have some kind of justice.''

Sitting at their kitchen table, they said they don't go a day without being reminded of their daughter, or how she died.

At the convenience store Jim Flynn now owns in Stamford, a child coming in for candy makes him think of Kathleen.

Esther Flynn, a high-school math teacher in Stamford, will see a child wearing a certain outfit, or hear some quality in a girl's voice. For a moment, Kathleen is there.

Just recently, Jim Flynn found himself in traffic behind a car carrying bicycles. One of them was lavender.

They gave Kathleen's bicycle to one of her friends. It had been a recent gift. Her birthday was Sept. 4, just 19 days before her death.

They kept her First Communion dress and the crafts and drawings Kathleen loved to work on. A Christmas ornament -- a wooden teddy bear -- hangs year-round in the kitchen. She made it for her father in the fourth grade.

Carefully packed away is the collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls. Esther Flynn said they will keep them forever.

*

This and other Cold Cases stories may be found at The Courant's Web site, http://courant.ctnow.com/coldcases